How to Start a Blog Site using WordPress – Basic 5 Steps for New Bloggers

Hey, I’m Chris. I wrote this article and I’m also the founder and Editor of DailyTekk. Lets connect on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. Check back daily!

Without doubt, blogging is becoming a trending nowadays for people to share their daily activities. With an online presence, bloggers can better introduce themselves, showcase their knowledge, share what they are interested, and even make money by selling advertising spaces on the blog sites. In this case, more and more people are considering joining in the group, so we’d like to introduce the top 5 basic steps about where to start.

Use WordPress as the Blog Builder

In the very beginning, you need to choose a blog builder to set up your site. After all, as a newbie, it is impossible for you to do this using the HTML code purely. Besides, do not use some blogging platforms like Tumblr, for they cannot give a self-building site that is completely owned by you.

Here, we highly recommend you to have a try on WordPress. This is one of the most widely used CMS for starting a blog site on the web. Its intuitive interface makes the editing and publishing of blog posts an easy thing. Besides, with the support of numerable templates and plugins, you can customize your blog in any way you like.

Choose Proper WordPress Hosting

Although WordPress is free to download and use, you still need to pay some money for the hosting service. Generally, for the personal blog site, the shared web hosting is enough, which is charged around $7/mo on average. In this case, the service that is costing beyond $10/mo is not cost-effective. Also, for some that is cheaper than $3/mo, the service is full of scam and fraud.

Besides the price, the hosting performance is important. After all, the uptime and page loading speed directly influence the reading experience of your visitors. Besides, this aspect may affect your online ranking as searching spiders prefer to crawl and index the sites that come with the smooth performance. To check this aspect of a web host, you can search the customer feedbacks to figure out how people view their hosting performance. In addition, you can also refer to some hosting review sites like LinkedHosts that can collect and showcase the reliable statics of the hosting uptime and server response time.

Bearing these aspects in mind, you can easily find a cheap one by doing some reviewing and comparisons. If you feel headache to pick among the numerous options, these best WordPress hosting can narrow down your selection greatly.

Install WordPress Core with Auto-Installation

Now, you have prepared everything in detail, and it’s time to start your blog site. Firstly, you need to install WordPress on your hosting account. Initially, this may be a complicated process for beginners as it requires the unzipping of WordPress package, the creation of database and user, the renaming of wp-config-sample.php file, the uploading of WordPress files, and the running of WordPress installation scripts.

At present, however, this is not the case. Almost all the web hosts include the 1-click WordPress installer into the hosting package, such as the QuickInstall offered by HostGator, SimpleScripts offered by BlueHost and Softaculous used by InMotion Hosting. With these tools, you only need to click a few buttons, enter the required information, and continue clicking. Then, you can start a WordPress blog without any hassle.

Install Suitable WordPress Plugins and Themes

Besides the WordPress core, you also need to install the needed WordPress plugins to extend the functionality of core installation. For instance, you can use the WP Super Cache to speed up the webpage loading, WordPress SEO by Yoast for the search engine optimization, Better WP Security for the safeguarding of the blog site and many more. Generally, for a personal blog, these 3 plugins are enough for you to handle a blog for the most basic situations. Also, you can install more according to your requirements, such as the contact form plugin, social plugin and gallery plugin, etc. Here, you need to note that do not install too many plugins, for this may negatively affect your website running. Personally, 5-7 plugins are enough for a small blog site.

After choosing the plugins, you now need to install the WordPress template. By default, WordPress has in-built themes that are 100% compatible with the system. However, these themes may be used by millions of users, leaving no uniqueness to your blog. In this case, you’d better manually pick one that comes with the attractive appearance and well-organized layout. You can search from some theme market places such as Elegant Themes, Template Monster, Mojo-Themes, Ink Themes and many more.

Start Blogging Regularly

Now, your blog site is built successfully, so you can start blogging. Note that you cannot do this carelessly. After all, the content is the core of any kind of website. We have listed some tips in the following.

The blog posts need to be 100% original and information-rich. This is because both readers and search engines hate the poor-written or plagiarized posts.

Select some hot topics and write accordingly. This can arouse people’s interests and attract more readers.

Place the keywords into the post title, sub-headline and content body naturally for around 5 times. This is great for the search engine optimization.